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Are 301s advisable for low-traffic URL's?

We are using some branded terms in URLs that we have been recently told we need to stop using. If the pages in question get little traffic, so we're not concerned about losing traffic from broken URLs, should we still do 301 redirects for those pages after they are renamed?

In other words, are there other serious considerations besides any loss in traffic from direct clicks on those broken URLs that need to be considered?

This comes up because we don't have anyone in-house that can do the redirects, so we need to pay our outside web development company. Is it worth it?

15 Responses

Traffic: First, you want to know if these pages are generating any traffic. If they are, you should keep them. If they aren't (which it sounds like they aren't), move on to checking links...

Links: Before you scrap pages generating little inbound traffic, you should check to see if said pages have any inbound links. If they do, you would want to evaluate the quality of those links and determine if that is greater or lessor than the cost of keeping the pages and setting up redirects. If you determine these pages have valuable links, definitely 301 redirect them to a good substitute page.

When I speak of the cost associted with setting up the redirects I'm talking about the time taken to set up the redirects (likely your time or ITs time).

The link doesn't need to be broken. 301 redirect the existing link to the new one and anyone that is linking or typing or clicking into the old URL will be forwarded to the new one and they wont know it. Make sense? Yes, do it!

Redirecting them won't help the main domain rank for these brand terms, but it will capture the type in traffic and pass most of the link juice coming into these other sites.

Ultimately it shouldn't take your web development company long (unless you have hundreds) and indeed you could maybe even do it at the registrar easily (if not efficiently), so don't pay through the nose for it.

On the other hand, unless you rely on links from those other sites it won't harm your main site in any way by letting them die.

OK, so the fact that your site has broken URLs doesn't bring your site in general down in the search engine rankings? Broken URLs aren't necessarily an indicator of a poor quality site that would result in some sort of penalty?

If I'm reading this right though, it is only the URLs they've got to stop using, not the content. Therefore a 404 provide alternate content suggestions isn't necessary in this case; I agree that a 301 redirect is best solution - it passes the human traffic and the link juice to the correct location.

As to whether it is worth the cost, then of course it is the famous answer of "it depends". However, I'd imagine that the cost of redirects should be pretty minimal and if the old URLs drive just a couple of conversions (whatever that may be) then it should have been worthwhile, even ignoring the link juice.

This almost fully answers my question. Those pages don't have inbound links from other sites. We have over 10,000 pages on the site, so we can't have links to them all. So, they aren't worth keeping for traffic or links.

But you say, "I would hope that you capture your 404 errors and 301 redirect all the time anyway." So, my last remaining question is: Am I necessarily creating 404 errors by not redirecting?

If those pages are indexed by Google and Google returns them in SERPs then yes, they will 404. That is why you need to test the page first and do a header redirect 301 to either the category page or the home page.

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